


Shadow Game

by purple01_prose



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Dark Agenda, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, LITERALLY, Obsession, Pitch is creepy, this should surprise no one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-06 22:59:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purple01_prose/pseuds/purple01_prose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stars above, he thought incredulously, I'm fond of the girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadow Game

_“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.”_

_Sigmund Freud_

 

He realizes he is fond of the girl the same day he realizes lead from the Earth’s core could be used against light-based weaponry.

 

These two singular observations are not related in the slightest (or so he claims). The second observation he has in the early morning hours, right before the sun rises. Though his lair is far below ground, he is always aware of the sun’s placement in the sky, and the early morning hours are when he is at his most brilliant. The first observation occurs to him in the twilight hours of dusk, the moments he has his melancholia (if he did, which he certainly does not).

 

He had not even been contemplating the fierce girl-child, merely sketching plans for lead-based armor and weaponry when out of nowhere, it was as though a bolt had hit him and he thought, _I am fond of Katherine_.

 

He’d nearly fallen out of his chair at the time.

 

Honestly, the first time he had met her, she had been merely a small girl-child in a clutch of children, and their fear had been so potent, so _intoxicating_ —they were children who had never known fear before, and unlike the fear of infants (which was also potent, but raw, unrefined), they _knew_ what they were feeling and why they were feeling it.

 

Oh, it had been _such_ a rush, to touch innocent children.

 

When he next met her, when she had flown out of the sky and rescued the wizard and the thief (his blood still boils at how close he had been, how close he had become to complete and total victory), that was when he thought—no, _knew_ —what a fierce Fearling she would make. She was dead frightened of him (and though her fear was not as heady as that first time, he had still nearly staggered from its power), but she had bravely carried on, rescuing her friends, and even when all hope was lost and he stood over her, gloating, she then repaired them, her face drawn and determined.

 

When the thief had mentioned the drawing in the djinni, after he had taken his leave of them (it was _not_ retreat), he had opened the chest and taken out the drawing. At first he’d wanted to crumple it and throw it into the fires of the core, so that he could harm the thief at will while within the djinni, but the amount the detail gone into the sketch had its appeals.

 

Instead, he’d tucked it into a wall alcove and let it be.

 

He was...fond of her.

 

He had argued with himself for days, terrifying his Fearlings with his brooding and quick temper. No, he could not possibly be fond of the girl-child. She was all _light_ and _hope_ and _dreams_ , just like the thief, Ombric, and that _Nightlight_. (While he would later admit to himself that turning Katherine into his Fearling Princess was an act of respect for her, an acknowledgment of his fondness for her, his plans for Nightlight had always been drenched in revenge, for being a prisoner for millennia at that spirit’s hands. While he had first planned to taint the light spirit, now he just wanted to kill him). She hated him (though as any would attest, that did not exactly stop his emotions from latching onto her). She feared him.

 

Yet she reminded him of someone else, another girl-child he vaguely remembered (her smile, the fall of her hair against her cheek), but whose name he could not recall, though it always seem to rest on the tip of his tongue, waiting for the right cue.

 

When she holds up that locket, in an attempt to prevent his victory _yet again_ , there in the midst of the Earth’s core, he howls with pain.

 

_Seraphina, oh Seraphina, my dearest child, how I have failed you._

He retreats to his space, where the Fearlings cannot follow, a place deep below ground. He paces and paces, attempting to force an epiphany like the one that had begun all this trouble.

 

First, he must get rid of his humanity. His grief for his daugh—no, that was another life, he was a different man—is crushing him. He cannot rest, cannot even relax, under its weight. He cannot be the Nightmare King while grieving.

 

(That there are, or would be, humans who would recommend he channel his grief into constructive behavior, he ignores. He cannot have humanity and be the Nightmare King, the shadows that haunt every child’s fear. No matter how brave a child is in the light, they behave very differently in the dark).

 

Second, the fact that it was Katherine who reminded him of his daught—no, that other’s man daughter—only solidified his intent to turn her, corrupt her to his darkness, turn her into his darkling daughter, where he could protect her from under his mantle.

 

Her dreams of becoming his daughter (that she would call them nightmares is, in itself, irrelevant) happen without his influence, but he’s aware of them, just as he is aware of every child’s dream that deals with him as a _dramatis personae_. It makes him even more determined to make it happen; fate is not set in stone except by which you determine.

 

Katherine will be his, he vows to himself.

 

He takes her tooth for petty reasons—her fear that she’ll never know what happened to her parents or why she was so abandoned, he can use this as leverage later on—but when he sees what happened to her, he is nearly bowled over. He makes himself smile at her, blows away the dust from the rotted tooth, but he is rattled.

 

How can _Hope_ have saved her when Hope died millennia ago?

 

Still, that marked her for dear Tsar Lunar from the beginning, when she was a babe-in-arms.

 

Taking her will spite that old man up in the sky (Pitch conveniently ignores that he is older), and so he makes his decision.

 

He will have her, even if he must wait for her to grow up. That which she doesn’t know will come to be his greatest asset, and as long as the ‘Man in the Moon’ merely communicates by scrying glass _alone_ , she will be easy to turn.

 

It will happen, all in good time.

 

But she will not be a Fearling—no, she is too brave, too spirited for that. No. She will be his right hand—she will be like him. The Nightmare Princess, perhaps even its Queen.

 

She just needs to grow up.

 

In the meantime, he makes plans. That old fool’s sand may be hard to convert, but he manages, and while Seraphina taking him and Katherine was certainly _not_ planned, it will help later.

 

It creates common ground.

 

The pieces are stacking into place, and he will glory in its completion when Katherine comes to him willingly.

 

She will.

 

He knows she will.

 

So he begins to count down the days.

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, Pitch is creepy.
> 
> And he doesn't even realize he is, which somehow makes it worse.
> 
> Okay, so like, I have SO MANY THOUGHTS for the Seraphina-Pitch-Katherine convo in the fourth book. BUT I AM SO LOOKING FORWARD TO IT, AWKWARD FAMILY REUNIONS FOR THE WIN. Like, I really want Seraphina to keep Pitch and Katherine at her side all the way through the book, dealing with their issues collectively, while the first time Katherine kind of comes to after the whole 'holy shit, did Mother Nature just kidnap me along with the Nightmare King' realization, Jack's hanging out there while Seraphina and Pitch are off dealing, and is like, hey gurl. Katherine's all dafuq, but she and Jack kind of talk before Jack makes like a bat out of hell and Seraphina and Pitch come find Katherine, and Seraphina is a fan of forced mediation, so while they're dealing with ISSUES, North + Ombric + Toothiana + Bunnymund + Nightlight try to find the Sandman so that the Sandman can beat Pitch's ass, and after they find Sandy, Jack shows up and is all like, hey guys, so, uh, Kate's okay, I swear, she's having tea with Mother Nature and the Nightmare King, and I think Mother Nature mentioned something about getting the Mad Hatter there too, haha jk.
> 
> (I read Book!Jack as being really irreverent, and being TOTAL BROS with Sandy. Gah, how am I having feelings about a character I haven't even READ YET my god).
> 
> So yeah. I'm hesitant to characterize Seraphina (although my standard: she doesn't speak, she's capricious and can be downright cruel, but she protects her loved ones with the fury of, well, the force of any and all natural disasters, and her sense of humor is quirky and dangerous) in this fic, because Pitch has this thing about placing people on pedestals. He sees Seraphina as his innocent daughter that he failed to protect, and he wants to see Katherine as his daughter that is an extension of himself.
> 
> Yes, Pitch would be THAT PARENT.
> 
> Since Pitch's ideas about his children are very much dependent on that pedestal here, you don't get a sense for who they are, only for what Pitch thinks they are. And what he thinks of their character is a derivative of what he thinks of them, so from that standpoint, Katherine and Seraphina are more like plot devices than actual characters, and that was very deliberate.


End file.
